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I think Dean Kamen might have solved this problem already.

http://www.redferret.net/?p=10...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

My God, it exists.

Cool. But I'm sure you're not the only one. E.g. consider this Slashdot comment from 2008, where some of the replies discuss combining touch-interfaces with screens that can deform dynamically to remap keys. The discussion also references articles about touchscreens and deformable keyboards, as well as clickable touchscreens.

I think the general idea of "a screen that can alter its texture" is pretty generic, and lots of people have had that idea. The further idea to use shape-memory and/or photo-responsive polymers as a means of doing that is more specific (and cool!) but still fairly broad.

I'm not trying to denigrate your idea. Lots of brilliant ideas were independently developed. All I'm saying is that the idea alone, while crucial, is actually the easy part. The implementation details are by far the more difficult part, and really the only part that might deserve patent protection and proceeds. (Whether or not this particular patent fits the bill, I'm not sure.)

Don't forget about Killer Bean Forever by Jeff Lews. Made entire movie himself. No Hollywood. http://www.redferret.net/?p=9573

• Drive through window on doughnut/coffee shops. I saw my first one about three months after I had the idea.
• Building a universal remote control into a Star Trek phaser or tricorder housing and selling them at conventions. That idea died as soon as I googled it.
• Adding a button on your TV that makes your remote control beep, so you can find the thing when it decides to walk away. Again.

Steps 1 and 2 of your plan are not the easiest things in the world. Chances are if you've managed Step 1, someone else has already done Step 2 and is merrily working on Step 3.

Tactile response is a huge reason we have keyboards. The technology that can replace them is here now, and has been for quite a while. But nothing can beat the practicality of a keyboard. Replacing it with a touchscreen is just impractical. There's no tactile response, and banging your fingers on a hard, unyielding surface is going to cause typing fatigue much quicker. /.../

This seems promising...

With a little luck, and some help from engineers, they will still have tactile feedback. I'm actually rather anxious to try one of these Nokia "haptic" screens.

There's numerous ways to provide tactile feedback. It's not a particularly difficult problem, i'm sure we'll have it soon enough.

Here ya go. Expect a patent though :(
http://www.redferret.net/?p=9533

There's been plenty of research into tactile touchscreens already (Nokia seem to think they're on to something ). I'm sure there will be more within the next 7 years.

Imagine in the bar, phone goes, and you whip that bad boy out on the bar and answer it - how cool you would be!

Seems like most people mentioned all the other sources I knew of... though there is also Creative Commons Audio.

Not too much stuff here but it's all free: http://stash.nugs.net/stash.asp.

http://www.redferret.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php

Even Lars Ulrich has softened up and offered live Metallica concert downloads for free.

P.S. Check out the music video in my sig while you're at it... it's a monologue about destroying technology by a rapper from the year 3030.

FM Radio cards:

http://www.cel-soft.com/RadioCard.htm

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2905632&CatId=1425

USB radio:

http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/13/usb-radio-dongl e/

http://www.redferret.net/?p=7760

The Tigerdirect link is also a TV tuner card. You can record more than just the radio.

I have one in my Ubuntu box. It's kind of a pain to tune with the command line, but it works well. As an added bonus, it ignores Macrovision for converting your old VHS tapes. (oops is saying that a DMCA violation?)

"Recording off the radio onto tape produces a lower fidelity analog copy and subsequent generations of copying of that copy introduces more noise at each generation."

You just time traveled from what decade?

FM Radio cards:

http://www.cel-soft.com/RadioCard.htm

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2905632&CatId=1425

USB radio:

http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/13/usb-radio-dongl e/

http://www.redferret.net/?p=7760

So how is saving a stream off the net any different than recording from one of these?

--
BMO

Well erm, Brother has a piezo electric row printer that can spit out 170 pages a minute that sounds familiar. Also using the row-at-a-time-like-a-fax-machine trick

http://www.redferret.net/?p=5291

> While biometric scanners can be fooled, it's not trivial to fool them,

haha.

I stopped buying music years ago when I had a really busy time studying. After that period of withdrawal I heard about some free music labels, got curious and never looked back again.
In the beginning I was impressed by programs that automatically download free music, based on ratings you give.
Today I have a quite large collection of free tracks and albums. From time to time I visit, some, of those. All that is 100% annoyance-, tool-, ad-, DRM- and RIAA-free.

Here's a short comparison I made between the two products with a side by side specification chart of them both. The Sony comes out somewhat weaker in many areas.

You mean "Sony v. Universal Studios"

Yes, thanx. That's the right title of the Betamax case. I wasn't paying attention and I wrote it wrong.

determine if there are substantial non-infringing uses

I'd like to quote the Supreme Court's exact rule: "it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses".

That is in fact a rather difficult test to fail. I am not aware of any product ever failing that test. The Supreme Court knew full well that it was a test that was almost impossible to fail, and they explained themselves quite well why they ruled that way. That an innocent inventor creating a new product for some legitimate purpose cannot be expected to have some crystal ball to know what percentage of users will use it in what way, and that he is not responsible for people who turn that product to some other illegal use. The basic principal that spoon inventors and spoon sellers are not responsible if people start using spoons to commit murder.

as we recently saw in the Grokster case, the key phrase is "non-infringing uses".

No, you are misstating the Grokster case. The Grokster result had absolutely nothing to do with non-infringing uses.

The Grokster case absolutely affirms the Betamax ruling that Grokster cannot be sued simply for making P2P software, even if that software is overwhelmingly used to infringe. That Betamax is an almost absolute shield against being sued for making and providing a product.

What Grokster says is that that does not prevent you from being sued for doing other things. Well duh, if you commit murder while selling VCRs, Betamax is obviously not a sheild against being held liable for that other illegal act.

Grokster did not lose for making and providing the P2P product that they did. That was perfectly legal.

What Grokster was held liable for was something completely separate. They were held liable for running advertizements essentially telling people to commit infringment. They would have been liable for that even if they had not been providing P2P software at all.

Grokster would have won had the P2P product been exactly the same, if only they didn't tell people they should use it to break the law.

I can sell spoons, but I am going to lose just like Grokster lost if I run ads saying that you should use my spoons to run around gouging random people's hearts out.

Spoons are legal and Grokster's P2P is legal. Telling someone to commit a crime is not.

As presented, there are very few non-infringing uses for the device qua file-sharing device since everyone involved in the sharing must have the copyright holder's permission to share the files.

Did you even read my whole post before jumping to post? How did you possible miss the part where I stated that I have an entire folder on my computer of public domain and Creative Commons music files, and that is is absolutely legal for anyone and everyone to distribute and redistribute those files as much as they like. iRate alone has probably close to a hundred thousand such songs that are perfectly legal to redistribute, and I am aware of many other sources for tons more music that is perfectly legal to redistribute.

You can even do an Advanced Google search restricted to Creative Commons works that are free to share. Doing a "free to share" search on the term MP3 gets over 3 million hits. The Creative Commons website has many links to sites with free to share content. And this website has a bazillion links to free music, many of which are explicitly free to redistribute.

-

Why is anyone suprised? I'm not.

Remember this previous story from early June? Here's the direct link.

You mean The Euphonix MC?

The Brother Industries high speed inkjet printer in prototype form. Codenamed Cobra, this little puppy can spit out any size of print output at around 170 pages per minute. OK, you want me to back up and repeat that? Any size of printed inkjet paper output at 170 pages every sixty seconds. Demonstrated for the first time ever last week at a Brother press seminar. How are they doing it? Well....

So apparently the secret lies in the use of new Piezo Inkjet Line Head technology, which prints at 600×600 dpi, but doesn't actually move at all. The ink is transferred at high speed as the paper passes underneath the static nozzles. (see below left - click on all images for full view)

In order to get the throughput, the printer contains a separate head for each colour, so that the paper receives all the ink in one high speed sweep. The passel of assembled journalists at the demonstration last week saw this beast churn out 150 A6 pages a minute without drawing breath, which was pretty darn impressive. (see below right for a scan of the actual printed output)

The company boffins at the demo told us that in order to achieve this speed for larger paper sizes, they just need to connect up more heads in a wider array. For instance, two heads joined together longways would give A4 printing. The concept of poster sized inkjet prints being produced at offset litho printing speeds is little short of miraculous. But just think of the ink costs...ouch!

Apparently this technology also features the lowest power requirements of any inkjet head on the market, and is smaller than equivalent spec products, which should eventually mean good things for home as well as industrial users. Eventually? Well, the technology was first announced at this year's Cebit exhibition in Germany, but this was the first ever live demonstration to the media, and the company is being very coy on any production dates. In fact it seems that the tech needs some co-operative funding (i.e. a production partner?) in order to progress further. And no word on potential retail pricing was given either.

So for now the printer is seeing action only at the World Fair in Aichi, Japan, printing out A6 sheets for tourist visitors to the Brother pavilion. Here's hoping we see more of this amazing technology sooner rather than later. In the meantime here's a PDF of the technology paper.

Specification Notes.
Head - 2656 nozzles per head, 600 dpi, 108 mm width (4.25 inches).
Print speed - 800 mm per second.
Energy saving - Deformable Piezo actuator provides 1/14 of the power requirement of conventional nozzles. For example, the A6 picture sample on the right requires only 3 watts of power, at 150 sheets per minute.
Size - Trapezoidal nozzle zone shape provides for dense arrangement of cavities. The result is a head which is 152 mm wide, 22 mm deep and 1 mm high. Heads can be arranged in longer arrays as needed.
Droplet size - Unspecified. 4 sizes available.
Reliability - 10 billion dots/nozzle or more (still testing).

The scanned picture which the article mentions was continuously printed at 150 pages per minute is here. As sample images go it does contain a lot of colour, I would've assumed a "150 pages per minute" claim would've been in non-Real World cases like printing 8 coloured pixels on a piece of A4.

...to prove how insanely great the print quality is on this thing, the author of said article provides a very lossy jpeg scan as evidence. Having said that, if they can get 600x600 at > 100 PPM, I'm all in.